My Remarkable Journey (32 page)

And they can’t believe their eyes

’Cause the old team just isn’t playing

And the new team hardly tries

And the sky has got so cloudy

When it used to be so clear

And the summer went so quickly this year.

Yes, there used to be a ballpark, right here.

I told Chance how when Frank Sinatra chose that song, he said it was about more than just a ballpark. It’s about life, and
changing and growing up.

And the summer went so quickly this year.

Chance looked around and said, “Can we move back here?”

When I told him that would be impossible, he said, “Can we move this to Beverly Hills?”

Would I have gone back to Ebbets Field, sat on the curb, and sang that song if not for Chance? No. It’s mystifying what he
and Cannon have given me. My passion for baseball had been diminished by the time I moved out to Los Angeles. I stopped rooting
for the Dodgers when they left Brooklyn back in the ’50s and then I picked up with the Orioles when they trained in Miami.
But I was only a casual fan by the time I met Shawn. I’d turn on a game. But that was it.

The more the kids grew to like it, the more I got into it. Two years ago, I bought season tickets. Now I’m back where I started:
crazed. It was the kids who did it to me. They brought me back.

So much has come back to me in the last few years. I wasn’t there to have breakfast with Larry Jr. when he was a boy. But
when he comes to visit, Chance and Cannon run to hug him and they have pancakes together. He’s their big brother, that’s all.
They don’t know life any differently.

When Larry Jr. came back into my life and I had to tell Chaia, I didn’t know how she’d feel. She could have been mad. She
could have wondered where she stood. You never know how people will react. When Herbie and I sat with her and told her, she
opened her arms and said, “When can I meet him?” Now Larry Jr. and Andy go to University of Miami versus Florida football
games. And when Andy drives his motorcycle across country to visit, Chance and Cannon hop on for rides. It’s natural to all
of them, and that makes it natural to me.

I once announced a high school football game that Shawn’s first child, Danny, played. After he threw a touchdown I said over
the PA system, “Danny, you can stay out late tonight! Your mother says it’s OK!”

Now Danny is diagramming plays for Chance and Cannon’s flag football team. Chance is throwing long to Cannon. Their nanny,
Lib Lib, is filming, and is as much a part of the family as Auntie Bella was to me when I was a kid.

Larry Jr. has given me three grandchildren. Andy has given me two grandchildren and they have given me two great-grandchildren.
I like to joke that it makes Shawn the world’s youngest great-grandmother. The great-grandchildren are infants and they can’t
speak yet. What do you call a great-grandpa? I guess I’ll find out.

I’m not Solomon. But I’ve had so many experiences as a father. There’s a son that I adopted, a daughter that I lost, a son
that I found, a daughter, two stepdaughters from my marriage to Sharon who I’m happy to help out whenever I can, a stepson
who came aboard with Shawn, plus Chance and Cannon.

It’s hard to describe. But maybe it’s kind of like Chance’s first hit in T-ball. In their own way, everybody who wanted to
was able to jump into the pile out in center field.

Seeing Larry with the kids is awesome—in the literal sense of the word. It makes your heart expand.

We all get battered around by life and circumstances. Who knows what healing is going on with him and those kids right now?

The evolution started when Chance and Cannon were born. He was not there for a lot of the kids in their early years in a traditional
sense. But Chance and Cannon have allowed him to pour all those things he didn’t do with us into them.

T
HE
N
ANNY

People never believe me. But it’s the truth. I’ve never worked with a father so involved. He knows all the kids’ friends.
He knows everything. If the kids get a certificate in school, he’s there. It’s not that he has to do it. He wants to do it.
He takes them to school in the morning and he picks them up. He sits at what we call the housewife bench and waits. It’s one
of his favorite places. I think it calms him. It’s almost as if he’s nesting for the first time.

A little while ago we went to see
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
. Larry loved that movie. At first I thought it was slow. But Larry couldn’t stop talking about it. The more he talked, the
more it made so much sense to me. Brad Pitt kept getting younger and younger. That’s what Larry wants. I think this is his
best time right now, with Chance and Cannon, and he doesn’t want it to end.

I said, “Larry, if for Christmas I could buy you a clock that goes backward, I would.”

We went to Busch Gardens in Florida when Chance and Cannon were younger. I got on one of those spinning rides with them. You
know, one of those coasters. My dad was watching. Every time I went by, I was screaming: “Dad, dad, look at me.” I was forty-five,
but I was laughing and screaming, “Dad! Dad!”

I told him afterward, I didn’t get to do that when I was five. So I had to do it now.

Some kids in my position would be upset over what was missed. But I don’t look at it like that because of my mom’s teachings.
I just cherish every moment that I have with my dad.

My dad’s like a father and a grandfather. Maybe I’m like a sister and an aunt. In the old days, sisters would help out like
an aunt would. Our culture now is different. But I feel like that kind of sister to Chance and Cannon. Not that I’m there
to guide them every day—I live on the other side of the country. But families pull together all the time.

When I try to describe what it’s like, I have to hesitate because what your family is to you is what it is. What you know
is normal. And
normal
might be the wrong word here because my dad’s life has never been normal. But it ain’t dull. I have never been bored.

S
ON

Having Larry King show up to announce your high school football game is bizarre—and that’s an understatement. He wasn’t doing
it like a normal PA announcer. He was announcing the game. I would take the snap and hear in that one-and-only voice: “Southwick
drops back to pass…”

He’s not afraid to go out and have fun. Did you see him in the bathtub with Jim Carrey on the David Letter-man show? If you
haven’t, you should YouTube it.

S
ON

Have you ever heard my dad sing rap songs? It’s pretty funny.

S
ON

In real life, he’s a lot more goofy than he is on the show.

But he’s also taught me a great deal about being successful. He knows exactly what he wants. He said all successful people
he knows have that quality: being decisive. Once you know what you want to do, you’ve got to do it to the fullest.

Larry Jr. has also taken an interest in me. Andy and Chaia live in Florida, but it’s very friendly when we’re together. Coaching
Chance and Cannon has been some of the most fun I’ve had in football—and I’ve played a lot.

My entire family has been affected by Larry. Coming from a divorced household can be tough. To have all these other people
in your life is an experience that I wouldn’t trade.

When I visit my father, I’m able to do the same things I do for my kids. I can make pancakes in the shape of animals or L.A.
for the Dodgers. So I’m able to engage my brothers the way I’m able to engage my own children. But my dad’s sitting at the
breakfast table with them. I’m the kid serving the kids. It’s almost an out-of-body experience. But it’s natural.

We harass each other. They’re for the Dodgers. I’m for the Rays. It’s like when my brother Andy and I get together. When I
was a kid sitting up in the stands at the Dolphins games, watching my dad through the binoculars and listening to him on a
radio, I didn’t know my brother Andy was on the sidelines. Now Andy and I harass each other because he’s for the Gators and
I’m for the Hurricanes.

My dad is one of those gifted people who can focus and dedicate his life to doing what he wants to do. Early on, he wanted
to be Arthur Godfrey. He’s accomplished that. He’s exceeded that. Now he’s getting near the end of his career and he’s turned
that focus toward family.

His life has come full circle.

Did you know that when Chaia was little she thought that Pepto-Bismol was a drink?

When I was little, my dad left the house. Then my mom turned on the TV and my dad was inside. I said: “How’d you get in there,
Dad?”

Did my dad ever tell you how he got thrown out of my Little League game? I was pitching. He was arguing a call. The umpire
said, “Go back to CNN!” The umpire wasn’t joking. The umpire said, “If you don’t go to the parking lot, this game is going
to be forfeited.” So my dad went to the parking lot. He said he just can’t stop from arguing a bad call. It’s the Leo Durocher
in him.

My dad is just crazy about baseball. When we watch ESPN, he’s screaming. I told him, “Dad, the players can’t hear you.”

Sometimes he starts screaming the Brooklyn stuff. “You bums!” It’s much more fun to hear him talk the Brooklyn way.

Young is for playing. Old is caring for other people.

I just feel like my dad’s with me forever. It’s really good to have that feeling in your heart when you think of your dad.

E
IGHT YEARS AGO
, if you had told me that a black guy from Hawaii, raised by a white grandmother, who went on to become an egghead lawyer
from Harvard and a Democratic politician with the most liberal voting record in the Senate, would win the presidency by beating
a white American war hero, I would have said one thing: “Are you nuts?”

But four years ago, there was a sign. One evening, Barack Obama stormed the Democratic convention with a speech. I was with
the Republican senator Bob Dole at the time. Dole leaned over to me and said, “You’ve just seen the first black president
of the United States of America.”

Obama’s election is the most historic of our lifetime. The biggest blight on our record as a great nation has been slavery.
It’s something we’ve never lived down. Its wounds are still there because grandchildren of slaves are still among us. Think
of the unbelievable nature of that. Grandchildren of slaves witnessed this election. We’ll never see anything like it again.

Obama’s victory is a testament to the power of eloquence. There’s a lot to be said for eloquence. There’s a calmness in eloquence.
People will turn to an eloquent person in a crisis.

Obama ran on change and we certainly need it. Yes, it would have been a change if Hillary Clinton had been elected. But a
Clinton following a Bush following a Clinton following a Bush wasn’t enough change. Obama represented hope. He’s black, but
he’s also white. He’s balanced.

There was some filth thrown at him. He was called anti-American. He was called a terrorist. He was called a socialist. None
of it stuck because of his composure. It made me convinced that there is less and less of our terrible history embedded in
us. And I think we will keep on healing.

I was at Jackie Robinson’s first game, and I interviewed him just before he died. He was blind from diabetes, and a guy who
gave him a book to sign had to turn it right-side up to show him where to write his name. Jackie said, “Don’t put me in a
grave with promises. I don’t need promises. I’ve heard promises all my life. Give it to me now. Then, when I die, I know it’s
OK.”

I watched how Martin Luther King Jr. advanced the entire nation while the FBI spied on him. I listened to Harry Belafonte
tell me about the ceremony at the White House when the Civil Rights Act passed. As he was going forward to shake hands with
Lyndon Johnson, he said, “Thank you,” to the president. Then he said to himself,
Wait a minute. I’m thanking him for my birthright. Why do I have to thank someone for my birthright?

Now we have a black president, and an election that brought out the best in us. My wife, who voted for John McCain, was moved.
McCain’s concession speech, my brother Marty pointed out, was hailed in Europe as the way a democracy should function. And
George W. Bush was as eloquent in speaking about the historic nature of Obama’s victory as I’d ever heard him.

It will not be easy for Obama. I’ll always remember being in the White House with Bill Clinton as we looked out a window at
the people walking on Pennsylvania Avenue. “I envy those people,” Clinton said. “They can walk on the street. This is a lonely
place. A lonely place.”

But we all want the healing so badly that we’re going to make it work. I’ll always remember my kids on election night, cheering
the results. Yesterday, the boys went over to their friend’s house. Dante’s parents had dinner for them. My kids don’t know
black or white.

Maybe it’s our children who’ll bring about the healing.

I
T’S AWKWARD
for me to talk about the Larry King Cardiac Foundation even though it gives me some of my biggest thrills. That’s because
people come up to me and say things like, “I was at your foundation’s gala. You do so much good. You really ought to feel
proud of yourself.” It’s not that these sorts of comments make me feel embarrassed. It’s just that I don’t feel deserving.